Karel Gott announces concert

Czech superstar Karel Gott announced that he will appear at Prague's Malostranská beseda on Oct. 10 in a show billed as Karel Gott Still aLIVE. He will be sharing the bill with Ilona Csáková, Dasha, Michal David, Miroslav Žbirka and Libor Bouček. They will be accompanied by Pavel Větrovec and His Quartet.

The venue is relatively small, and according to organizers the show is already “definitively completely sold out.”

Gott was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in October 2015 and canceled all of his scheduled concerts and recording sessions after that. He successfully underwent chemotherapy and declared that he was fully recovered in March 2016, but was uncertain at that time if and when he would sing again. At the time, he promised his fans that he would not return unless he felt he could put on high-quality shows. “My ambition is to return to the stage in a form that people know me and rightly expect, and I don't want to be pitied and tolerated, with illness noted in my performance. Until then, I will enjoy the time with my family,” he said in March.

He made a surprise appearance Sept. 6 at the 70th birthday concert for singer Hana Zagorová at Lucerna, his first singing appearance in almost a year. During his treatment, he appeared at the Czech Nightingale Awards (Český slavík) on Nov. 28 but did not perform. His doctors had advised him not to go, but he said after the event that the energy and support of his fans was “better than any medicine.” He won the award for musician of the year for he 40th time. He first won the award in 1963.

Gott also recently announced a new double CD called 40 Slavíků, which will contain two new songs that Gott recorded over the summer. The title of the album refers to his Nightingale awards.

Gott was born in 1939 in Plzeň, West Bohemia. He began his career in 1960 and achieved fame not only in then-Czechoslovakia but also Germany and Russia. He has sold an estimated 50 million to 100 million records in his career. Gott also achieved some fame in the United States, spending six months in 1967 performing at the New Frontier Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The next year, Gott represented Austria in the Eurovision Song Contest with the song “Tausend Fenster,” but did not win.

Gott had a farewell tour in 1990, but its success convinced him to keep on performing. In the 1990s he also increasingly became interested in painting. In May 2014 he published an autobiography.